"Rest" experiment update

Here's an update on the "rest" theory:

On January 13 I posted that I was ailing and was trying out the philosophy that resting when ill is a valid use of time, especially in retirement, when there's lots of time, right? I slept longer, drank hot tea, ate chicken soup, and generally lounged around on a lazy schedule. I was sure I would chase that cold away in a week or less.

A full two weeks later, the cold is almost, but not quite, gone. Two weeks. So much for the idea that rest saves me sick time.

A friend of mine, a pressured professional who sometimes gets sick but who almost never takes a sick day, told me his philosophy of illness: "When germs are chasing me, I try to run as fast as possible so they can't catch me." That's close to how I used to do things when working, and colds, which occurred rarely, almost never lasted more than 10 days.

I might give the rest experiment one more try the next time I come down with something, but so far it looks like the "Run so the germs can't catch you" model may be the one to stay with.

So how's it going?

The business manager I used to work with wrote me a couple of days ago and asked, "So what have you been doing?" I knew she was really asking, "So has it turned out so far like you wanted?" Her question made me stop to assess.

She knew I had been worried about piddling. Well, yes, I piddle. I try to catch myself at it, hence a lecture to self like, "Hey! You've just read two pages of TripAdvisor reviews on that restaurant; you don't need to read two more. That's inertia." Or piddling.

On the other hand, I"ve accomplished some things! We had a great vacation on a white-sand Florida beach. Right now we're on another trip, 200 miles away in another part of the state. Earlier this week I filled my car with surplus household equipment I had painstakingly sorted out, and delivered it to the local Goodwill store. I have started reading some of my set-aside books (take note, Andrei Codrescu!) and have started a photography project. I have made a little progress with Spanish (I can ask, "Puedo pagar de targeta de credito?" and I can count from one to twenty). The pumpkin shrimp soup recipe I tried got a thumbs down but all the new recipes I tried using cilantro got a thumbs up. And I do time on the treadmill nearly every day while watching delightful ten- and twenty-year-old shows of "West Wing" and "Law & Order."

That's not nearly the full vision of what I hope to do in retirement, but it's certainly a start. So, dear Grace, there's your answer. So far, so good!

On learning

Learning! I have just as much learning to do now as when I was working all the time.

The amount that I have to learn hit me again today, as I encountered yet one more thing to add to my “Need to learn soon” list. We’re planning a trip and I want to take my husband’s camcorder, which I have not used in years mostly because it refuses to play nice with my Mac. I can edit the video but I’ll need to re-learn how. It would also be nice to take along the audio recorder I bought last fall, which -- thanks to the busy-ness of the days since then -- I haven’t learned how to use yet. And once I get video and audio, I’ll need to relearn iMovie.  I knew an early version pretty well, but I have a new computer with the latest version and everything is different.

I also need to speed up my Spanish learning, which is proving more challenging than I thought. (When I try to call a Spanish phrase to mind, the French one comes instead.) And Spanish seems as frustratingly non-standard as English is. If only it were like amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, I could remember it better.

Less urgent but still nagging at me is the recognition I must learn more about Photoshop. Every time I tackle a photo of a grandkid or a beautiful flower, I need to blur or smudge or layer something and too often the result looks amateurish. I’ve got lots of resources to use for learning – and I have lots of time now, right?

Waiting patiently are the Great Courses I ordered from The Teaching Company. One is about jazz, one is about geology, and one is about meteorology. I have been curious about the weather patterns around our house, which have changed in the past decade, diverting most heavy rainfall. Half the time the radar shows the rains swerving north and northwest of us; many other times it shows the rains approaching, then dividing, each fork neatly swinging around our area and rejoining on the other side. It’s baffling. It’s probably a fantasy that I can learn enough from a Great Course on meteorology to explain this phenomenon but I thought I could try.

That’s not even a complete list of the things I plan to learn soon, but it’s a start. I need now to go do a review of the Spanish flashcards I have posted around the house. Chao.

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Hope?

Last fall before I started this blog, I wrote this:

"When I am retired, I am going to have all my medical, insurance, and financial documents all stored away in perfect order, and I am going to understand all of them. Am I setting myself up for disappointment?"

After a number of weeks of retirement -- in which I have made progress in some areas but none in this -- I am wondering whether any retiree who did not have all their medical, insurance, and financial documents all organized and comprehended prior to retirement has actually gotten all that under control once they had adequate time? Is there hope?

Rest, or not?

Ah, the life of the retired person who's sick. A couple of days ago I came down with a bad cold. So last night I went to bed really early, and today I'm drinking hot tea, eating chicken soup, and just sitting here. My Former Self would have worked late last night, taken cold medicines this morning just like on the ads, and headed off to the office hoping that work would take my mind off the cold miseries.

My Retired Self is feeling a tad lazy just now, though. Granted, I'm doing what doctors recommend, but isn't that a bit wimpy? I soldiered through before and lived to tell about it; why not now? Is sitting here with a latte and my feet up the best thing I should be doing right now?

Here's an item to add to my Retirement To-Do list: "Persuade myself that rest is a legitimate and good use of time." I'm resting, for a day at least, but still working on the guilt.

Preserving a sense of competence

I've started reading Mary Lloyd's book, SuperCharged Retirement, and think it may have enough good content to make it worth giving a sort of progressive book review as I work through the book.

At first I started writing today about what Lloyd had to say on "sorting" -- our need to know what it is we don't want to do, and the need to say No when someone offers an activity in that category. While that's important, there didn't seem to be a lot to say about that.

So I moved on, to where Lloyd suggests we retirees consider whether we need to preserve a sense of competence. She described her experience: "Many of the things that confirmed my value for me internally were in the work setting. There, I was perceived as competent and a resource to others. There, I got to solve complex problems as part of a team of intelligent, fun, enthusiastic peers. There, I knew how to do what needed to be done and got regular feedback … that I was doing it well…. [After leaving], before very long I totally lost my sense of competence in terms of what I thought of myself."

Lloyd said that for her, it was absolutely critical that she find things to do that required what she considered "important" skills. She considered herself competent at cooking and other homemaking skills but for her, excellence there was not sufficient. She finally determined that she would become a writer, a good writer. Getting published gave her a sense of competence that she valued.

This problem will not necessarily present itself to every retiree. However, it has been in the back of my mind because I was in a similar situation some years back. I was a stay-at-home mom when my daughters were preschoolers. I became skilled at all sorts of homemaking skills: not only cooking and baking but also canning, freezing, and preserving food from the garden, sewing and crafts. (Well, with the crafts maybe I never got actually skilled, but I tried.) I had a freezer full of homegrown food; I had shelves full of canned pumpkin and homemade pickles, jellies, and ketchup; and my daughter had a full Laura Ingalls Wilder costume complete with bonnet for Halloween dressup. My family duly appreciated all this. But I never felt really competent until I got into the workforce.

It does not necessarily follow that I will need to return to the workforce now in order to preserve a sense of competence. When I began to consider retirement, my assumption was that I would be able to say "been there, done that." During those long years of work, I proved I could solve complex problems and be a resource to others and I do not necessarily need to continue doing that forever.

Whether that assumption is valid remains to be seen. I haven't been retired very long yet!

Books on retirement

I'm going to make sure that those gloriously empty days of January offer some pleasant hours for reading, and near the top of my stack are the two books I bought last fall about retirement. I've haven't had much time so far to get into them deeply, but I think I will like both of them. One is What Color Is your Parachute? For Retirement, by John E. Nelson and Richard N. Bolles. Back in the early 80s I had bought an book by Bolles entitled simply What Color Is Your Parachute? I found it tremendously helpful. Aimed at people who were considering a career change, it included questions and and instructions for making lists, to help the reader explore their skills and talents and preferences. Although my usual tendency in a book like this is to read the questions but not to put much effort into answering them, with this book I did them all. I still remember many of the questions. "What have you taught yourself how to do in the past year?" was one. I remember being surprised, once I thought about it, that I had actually learned how to do a number of things on my own. "What do people tell you that you are good at?" was another, and "In your perfect job, what sort of tasks would you have to do very seldom?" was another. A final assignment was to write out the specifics of my dream job: What would be the location, the work schedule, the type of supervision, the main duties, the duties that would be required seldom or never, the remuneration, and so forth. After doing all of that, I went out and found a job that was pretty close to the dream job I'd described.

So when I discovered there was a retirement version of the book with Bolles' name on it, I bought it instantly. Bolles seems to have moved on, however, and Nelson is the main writer of this version. Bolles wrote the introduction and said his contribution is "to frame some of the questions and challenges during this period." I hope that Nelson has carried on in the same spirit and that this book will be as valuable to me as the earlier one. Stay tuned and I'll share as I get time to read it.

The other book I bought is called Super-Charged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love, by Mary Lloyd. It also contains questions and instructions for lists. I've done some flipping through the pages and I think I'm going to find it quite valuable, maybe even more so than Parachute. I'll dig into it soon and start passing on whatever nuggets I find.

Finally . . .

Maybe tomorrow is when my retirement actually truly starts.

Finishing up at the office last Dec. 9 simply meant I could plunge headlong into a serious backlog of holiday preparations. In addition, we've brought the grandkids over several times during the holidays for long visits while their parents worked. Tomorrow, their school resumes for the spring semester. I returned them home tonight. Finally, tomorrow there will be no holiday deadlines to meet, no company coming, no kids to watch, no pies to bake. Nothing much coming up next week either. There are a few small things on the calendar and a few must-do items hanging over my head, but for the first time since I finished up my job, the days stretch out before me, gloriously empty. Perhaps my "sabbatical," in the words of my West Coast friend, is finally beginning.

Pluses and minuses redux

I have posted before about the pluses and minuses of retirement. Today the plus is that it's a Wednesday morning and I'm sitting in my living room with my grandson nestled up against me. But a minus has cropped up too.

For more than 15 years -- the entire length of time I have owned my own laptop -- a technical wizard with pertinent advice has been just around the corner. Because I logged hundreds of hours on job-related tasks on each of my personal laptops, the department's computer support wizard was always ready to help solve my problems. I know how to do basic troubleshooting, but when the problems proved intractable, advice was readily available.

Today my laptop is displaying repeated alerts that I ejected an external hard drive improperly. Problem is, I did not eject the drive; it remains securely moored in the port, even though it won't show up on my desktop. In other words, my computer is wacky. Basic troubleshooting and tips from a Google search have failed to solve the problem. A month ago I would have taken my laptop in to see the wizard, and a few minutes later I would have emerged with a fully functional laptop.

Today, I'm retired. I no longer have access to the wizard. My drive won't mount and I'm out of ideas.

So the balance is that I hug the grandson while spending hours on support sites……